Waldo County, Home To 3 Percent Of Mainers, Accounted For A 5th Of Virus Cases Over Past Week

Waldo County finds itself back in a position it hasn’t been in since April as it contends with a COVID-19 outbreak of at least 42 cases linked to a church in Brooks.Until last week, the county of fewer than 40,000 residents hadn’t seen a major outbreak since early in the pandemic, when the coronavirus swept through The Commons at Tall Pines nursing home, infecting 43 residents and employees and killing 13 residents there. On Tuesday, Waldo County had 49 known active cases of the virus, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. A look at Waldo County’s case numbers since April tells the story of a county that saw one of the state’s largest COVID-19 outbreaks early on, then saw little growth in infections until the outbreak connected to the Brooks Pentecostal Church earlier this month and a number of cases in Waldo County schools. CDC officials on Tuesday linked the outbreak at the church to cases at the schools and said it had also spread from there to an assisted-living facility in Searsport. The size of the outbreak has boosted Waldo County’s case numbers to the point where the county — home to 3 percent of Maine’s population — has accounted for almost a fifth of the state’s new cases over the past week.